Remembering Barbara Cohen’s Impact on Scientific Publishing

Image caption: Barbara Cohen, a founding editor of PLOS, died on October 21, 2024, in Asturias, Spain (photo credit: Sandra Aamodt).

About the author: Hemai Parthasarathy is an entrepreneurial scientist, who most recently directed the Rapid Evaluation team at Alphabet’s innovation lab, X (formerly Google [X]).  Previously, Hemai was a founding editor at PLOS and Managing Editor of PLOS Biology.

I tell people that leaving Nature to join the founding team of PLOS in 2003 was a no-brainer. Open access to the scientific literature, reinventing scientific communication in the internet age… of course! Important and (still) worthy goals. Motivation, however, is usually a little more complicated and it’s often a little more personal. The facts are that, one day, I got a call from Barbara Cohen, my former colleague at Nature Publishing Group. She had been recruited by the PLOS founders to build a publishing organization and they were trying to round out the editorial team. Did I want to join them? Did I ?? Barbara tapping me on the shoulder, inviting me to join her in a new (ad)venture was reason enough to do almost anything.

Barbara first entered the publishing world in 1994 as an editor on Nature’s biology team, having completed a Ph.D. in genetics and an EMBO postdoctoral fellowship. She rose quickly to become the Editor of Nature Genetics in 1997.

Kevin Davies, the founding editor of Nature Genetics, credits Barbara with stamping her own vision on the journal in its subsequent 3+ years, broadening its scope considerably from human genetics to include outstanding work in developmental biology and other fields (see also: Nature, genetics and the Niven factor | Nature Genetics). Her Nature Genetics colleague, Bette Phimister, adds, “I am grateful for her influence on me, the journal, and the field of genetics. She expertly and enthusiastically identified and dissected areas of uncertainty (genetic loci for complex traits, for example) and then implemented measures to reduce them.”

PLOS colleague Mark Patterson recalls first meeting Barbara at a Nature Genetics microarray conference in Scottsdale, Arizona, in 1999, where she gave the welcoming address (see also: Chips around the world: Proceedings from the Nature Genetics Microarray Meeting | Physiological Genomics). “What an impressive, inspiring figure she cut. She was editor of the sponsoring journal, which had presumably underwritten a lot of the cost, but she almost laid out a challenge to the audience, minimizing her role: ‘It’s your conference. Make the most of it!’”

Barbara was all about challenging – and simultaneously supporting – colleagues to be their best selves and make the most of opportunities. Bette recalls Barbara encouraging her to accept a conference invitation in Naples at a time when Nature Genetics could ill afford absences from the office. “You have to go,” Barbara told her. “Naples is amazing!”

Barbara left Nature Publishing Group in 2000, reappearing as the inaugural Executive Editor of the Journal of Clinical Investigations in 2001. JCI espoused free online access to its content ahead of many of its peers (see also: JCI – A mission statement for the JCI at the dawn of the 21st century) and was a natural prelude to PLOS, which she joined in 2003 to fully champion the cause of open-access publishing in service of the scientific community.

“I only really got to know Barbara when we worked together to establish PLOS as a publisher,” says Vivian Siegel. “I remember sitting together with her and the rest of the founding team to think about editorial standards. She suggested we establish a “no scooping” policy, understanding before many others how critical it is for multiple research groups to come independently to the same conclusion, and how racing to be first only undermined scientific quality.” A de facto editorial guideline from the beginning, that policy was made official fifteen years later (See: The importance of being second | PLOS Biology).

Barbara gave the same energy to details as she did to the big-picture decisions. Vivian offers as example: “She came to me to discuss a decision on one of the early submissions to PLOS Biology. The paper showed two proteins interacting with each other using co-immunoprecipitation (co-IP), but had a precipitating antibody in one direction and not the other. The reviewers and academic editor pointed out that the paper would be stronger if they could do the co-IP in both directions. Together we puzzled out the possible outcomes of this request, including the authors spending many months trying and unable to get a precipitating antibody. We realized we would publish the paper anyway – and that therefore it wasn’t right to delay publication for something that wasn’t going to change our decision. Instead, Barbara would let them know that if they do get the co-IP to work in the other direction, we could add that as an addendum to the paper.”

Even as we were all working furiously to launch PLOS Biology in October 2003, Barbara was already also knee deep in PLOS Medicine, which was scheduled to launch the following year. As Mark says, “No challenge was too great for her. I thought: Medicine is such a different world than basic research, I wouldn’t have a clue! But, she just went for it and, as always, rose brilliantly to the challenge.” I attended a dinner for PLOS Medicine, which Barbara convened just after the launch of PLOS Biology in which the key questions for the journal were discussed among noted clinicians. Everything was on the table from scope and editorial model to outreach strategies.

“Barbara, an editorial leader in her own right, created a culture of collaboration and shared decision making,” says Vivian. “She expressed no need to be recognized as ‘the’ leader of a group, promoting and backing others to take those roles as they arose.”

Barbara spearheaded the effort to launch PLOS Medicine from the outset with her singular enthusiasm and passion to create a new kind of a truly international, open-access medical journal “that is both scientifically rigorous and compassionate” (see: PLoS Medicine | PLOS Biology). Also true to form, she recognized the need to recruit an editor to lead PLOS Medicine, who came from that community.

That editor, Ginny Barbour, remembers meeting Barbara when she interviewed to be one of the inaugural editors at PLOS Medicine. “It was a very unusual interview! She led me on a high speed walking tour of San Francisco, talking nonstop for about six hours, up and down the San Francisco hills. In retrospect, it was a highly appropriate introduction to working at PLOS – which was also high speed, intense and required stamina! What we aimed to do at PLOS Medicine required overwhelming belief in the mission and a ferocious work ethic. Barbara had both of those and inspired others too.”

Ultimately, as Executive Editor for the PLOS journals, Barbara made critical contributions across the portfolio, including to the community journals and PLOS ONE. She took on the thorny problems of consistency and integrity in editorial decision making wherever they arose, and led new initiatives to improve the publication process. (see: “Simple Rules for Editors”? Here Is One Rule to Tackle Neglected Problems of Publishing: Response from PLoS | PLOS Computational Biology). As Managing Editor of PLOS Biology, I always knew that she had my back when unexpected issues with authors, reviewers and published papers arose.

Liza Gross, who took on the essential work of translating PLOS content for lay audiences, without herself having a scientific background, says: “Barbara was such a generous and enthusiastic mentor for me, never tiring of my constant stream of questions about technical terminology, research techniques, what authors were trying to understand and how to think about the significance of results.”

The last time I saw Barbara was when I visited her farm in Asturias, Spain, last spring. She had traded in her post-PLOS seafaring lifestyle (sailing a 52-foot schooner across the Atlantic, then wandering the Mediterranean Sea) for a 9-hectare farm in Tresmonte complete with “an old stone house, several barns, an hórreo, the ex-boat cat, a dog, 2 donkeys, 5 horses, and 12 sheep,” as Barbara itemized in an email in 2019. My visit was action packed (of course), but one moment stands out to me. Did I want to see the secret caves in the hills behind her house? Did I?? And there I was, scrambling through underbrush, along vestiges of trails disappearing into mirage, but trusting Barbara to lead me to and through a crack in the rocks that revealed cavernous spaces replete with bats and graffiti dating back to refugees from the Spanish Civil War. Following Barbara into adventures, big or small, was to be categorically alive.

Ginny sums it up best, when she says, “Working at PLOS was the highlight of my professional life, and working with Barbara was one of the main reasons for that. In addition to her intense work ethic, she was kind and funny, and her passion for life was infectious.”

Or, as Bette concludes, “She was full bore on everything that she did. Barbara’s radical honesty, brilliance, curiosity about other people, vim and love of life was a potent, delightful mix. I will miss her.”

As will we all.

If you have memories of Barbara you’d like to share, please add them to the comments section below.